Freefall
by l'amour-the-poet
Summary: It’s not a death wish if you can’t actually die.


_**Brief Note:**_ Chloe Fic. Post-Bulletproof. And Clark's 'big reveal' of his powers. Yes, Angst. And a pairing you don't see too often.

* * *

There are dozens of things I could have imagined. Chloe Sullivan-Writer, Chloe Sullivan-Investigative Journalist, maybe even for a little while, Chloe Sullivan-counselor to the downtrodden…  
Not Chloe Sullivan- Emergency Rescue Team Leader.  
But here I am, clinging to the rungs of helicopter ladder, preparing for the drop to the earth.

I hadn't meant to end up here, honestly. I just followed a chain of logical occurrences.  
My best friend was an alien, I had been possessed at least twice… forget I said that.

* * *

The simple kicker was that I felt betrayed.  
Four weeks after Clark Kent erased my memory, three weeks after I got it back by the intervention of a lot of computer coding, he asked Lois to do a special article on his powers for the Daily Planet. To reveal it to the world. Because the world needed to know.

Of course, he had asked me first, in that perfectly certain tone of his. And I told myself it was fine. Gone were the days when I waited for a sign that he really saw that something more in me. Actually saw something outside of that heroic facade he had constructed for himself.

I was a newlywed, with a nice keeper of a husband. I had a life. I wanted to make it work more than anything. And I was managing well enough.  
Generic things. Packing up sandwiches in baggies, talking about the latest articles in a newspaper I didn't work at.  
Then life knocked me sideways when I discovered I wasn't playing Suzy homemaker as I thought. My husband told me that I had changed again, that I didn't feel like his girl anymore. He liked me better before I'd really gotten all my memories back. (Although that wasn't exactly something I had shared.)

Despite everything, I couldn't tell him about the myriads of things going on in my brain. He might assume anything he wanted. The newspaper was coming out soon enough.  
He didn't know me.  
I proved him right by moving out, silently, the very next day.

* * *

I lived in a tiny apartment outside of Smallville for a while. Alone, mostly. Looking for something, anything, to occupy my time. Writing articles on dog shelters and soup kitchens for a newspaper with a staff of three.  
I'd cut my ties to my old life. I didn't want to be found. And I was lonely.

Once or twice, I found myself wanting to reach for the phone. To speak to Davis, the last friend left seemingly un-attached to this whole mess in my head. He wouldn't have reminded me about what pals Clark Kent and I always had been.  
He hadn't shown up for work- had disappeared from Metropolis immediately following my wedding.  
I think it really hurt him.  
But I was the one to feel betrayed. He said he'd be there.  
He'd gone, too.

* * *

I'd found my search and rescue team in pursuit of a story about the dangers of building complexes. It was a fire that had started small. One or two abandoned apartments. Built cheaply close together, so the flames had spread like mad. It wasn't exactly Mulholland Drive.

When I'd driven up, I was shocked at being the only reporter there. After Metropolis, it was hard to adjust to the small town again.  
It was the Squad leader's mother, tall broad lady- who told me he was injured by the fallen beams.  
The only two recruits, it turns out, were high school volunteers. Lanky boys. Green. Giving it their all. They'd done a good job getting most of the tenants out. All but two.  
The locus of the fire was just too close to do anything more.

The husband was already outside with burns on both of his arms from pushing at the burning door. They'd had to knock him out with a sedative. The wife was pregnant, they'd said. She'd been there before him. She'd probably died of smoke inhalation.  
Probable death. Funny how ridiculous that phrase could be when you brought green rocks into it.

Before being possessed by a supercomputer, I healed from anything. Including pulling other people from death. And then, while being a supercomputer, I'd pulled at least one into it.  
There was a slim chance that maybe, I still had the ability. That it hadn't all been burned out of me by the presence.

"I need a wet blanket." I said.

I was prepared to avoid the needles with the sedatives. However, I got handed one stiffly by one of the boys. He thought I was nuts, but he wasn't stopping me. Maybe he'd learned not to mess with crazy female reporters. Maybe he was thinking this was one of those stunts like you saw on Criss Angel.

Regardless, I didn't wait for his fellow to notice. I did one of those things they tell you to never do on those TV specials. I ran in the back way, where no one could see me. It was the only I could get in. It wouldn't help if I was extra crispy before getting her, or whatever was left, out.

The heat was oppressive on my skin already-I could feel the soot all the way in my nostrils. I didn't have super speed, or any useful power, but as I ran, it felt like I was a blur. Maybe it was my eyes watering from the smoke.

Two flights of steps up and a girl of indiscriminate age was crumpled on the landing. Not breathing. Not too much older than me. Very far along.  
Despite what they say about weight gain and pregnancy, my adrenaline went far enough for me to pull her down with me, somehow.

I had to heal her before the ambulances came and not end up in the morgue myself. Those type of things got around in a place like this.  
So I left her, propped up against the foliage of a tree out of sight.

The bustle was starting up and no one had even noticed when I pulled the same boy away. He had Clark's big guileless eyes. I pitied the girls he met. But I could trust him for this one thing.

"If you want to help, take her to her husband when the time comes."

"She's dead, Miss."

"She's away. Don't they have Rosencrantz and Guildstern are Dead on your reading list? Don't answer that.  
Listen.  
Whatever you do, don't take me to the morgue. Leave me."

"I don't understand."

"I'm a meteor freak. In a few minutes she will be alive and I will be very dead. Leave me here."  
I was convincing him in spite of himself.

"If somebody comes..."

"Tell them I'm high. Tell them I'm your sister. Tell them I'm Jewish. You'll figure something out."

"Are you seriously…"  
He looked about ready to have a panic attack.

"It's nothing much. I'm just going to do a bit of magic."

There were two lives in front of me. I hoped I could wake them both. Would the gift of mine make it to the fetus and to her? Would they live?  
I tried to remember what it was like to really cry, to push everything inside of me out though my fingertips.

One breath in, one breath out. My last for a very long time.

* * *

Today it is a stretch of desert outside of New Mexico, searching for lost and injured campers from the last incident. A group of meteor mutants attacking others to practice their powers. (Shockingly enough, my erstwhile best friend couldn't be everywhere.)

Dangerous job? You betcha. I've gotten shot twice in vital areas. Stabbed a few times. Hurts like the devil each time. I have to dig out the bullets and pull the skin together. The sharp sting of skin pulling itself over muscle makes me real. I've managed to do my job so well that no one ever talks about it.

I maintain that it's not a death wish if you can't actually die.

I walk ahead.  
There are three of us. Me, one man, one woman. They have had years to get to know this desert, experience. Sometimes, I wondered why they follow me.  
They never ask me why I choose the things I do.

My instinct tells me that the first place to search would be the caves. Everything is more concealed, more suitable for the sick tasks of those others.

* * *

Sometimes I hate walking right into the middle of things.

_More subjects. Excellent._ I hear that though no one actually speaks.

The math turns out like this. One person who can't die, teargas, a handgun and two normal people as backup, versus about one telepath and five other meteor freaks with unknown powers and three human shields between us and them.

Two men, one boy crouched on the floor like all those pictures you see in almanacs from the world wars. Dirty, smeared, wearing ill-fitting camping clothes. On the floor in execution pose.

The perpetrators don't even acknowledge us, besides that comment and the swing and hit of our guns against the cave walls. Maybe they are thinking up where to aim at us, their latest life-size dummies.

I don't need Braniac's powers to know the odds aren't on our side even if we get the campers to fight against their captors.  
Teargas is our last option, but it will send us all into fits of coughing.

Whatever happens here today, I'd probably make it out. I have five people to protect. I have nothing to do that with except my intellect.. No super-speed. No heat vision. Not even martial arts. It is days like this when I feel like caving and calling Clark.

Before I can say that one name, I hear a bullhorn. Thank God for the Albuquerque police.  
Apparently we are all surrounded.

And now we're six hostages instead of three.

They want to be left alone.

"Let the campers out." I say. I realize it's merely a formality, but it feels good to say the words.  
"You have us. We're enough for them to accede to your demands."

_That's a ridiculous thought. Give up extra hostages without any reward? To bunch of humans with guns?_  
I can almost hear the contempt in those words.  
A complete reversal of the Luthors. Just as bad. But even Lex could be jerked around once in a while.

"You're not from around here, are you?"

Distraction. Distraction is good. I don't say anything else.  
Classic Psych.  
_Tell me._

"No."  
_I can make you speak. I can pull it out of you._

The best way to convince a psychic is to be utterly convinced yourself.  
The one pain that affects me is emptiness. I would go though anything before reliving not knowing who I was, or what.  
I had no doubt that he could strip it out of me. I let the fear for memories trickle out.

"Albuquerque police have a way to neutralize you. An inhibitor, you know. A gas distilled from black kryptonite."

I had read about it. Experimental technique. Probably not in Albuquerque, but one of the products of human technologies. The best lies are partly true.

The bullhorn:_ "Respond or we will be moving in."_

_Leave the gas, and we'll give you the campers._  
Of course, he doesn't mention his new hostages.

They move painfully, two nearly trip over themselves to get out. One of the men doesn't move. He gets prodded with a boot.  
Nothing.

The others are at the mouth of the cave now.  
He curls himself into a ball and suddenly I understand. The ill fitting clothes, the sudden sickness…  
Black smoke surrounds us.

* * *

I find myself coughing my lungs out on the tailgate of a police car. It'll be about two hours before my powers reactivate and I get some control of it somehow.

"I'm sorry… I didn't know you were…"

"Yeah. No prob."

"Some water?"  
If I drank some it would probably get sprayed out through my nose.

"No thanks."

He's finally in a policeman's uniform, now. A normal sized guy. Honest face. Clear brown eyes.  
Trustworthy, though he's nothing like Clark. He doesn't remind me of anyone else, either. Not Jimmy. Not Davis.

"Anything else I can do?"

"Keep talking. It'll keep me from coughing out my liver."

"As you see, I was undercover."

"I should have noticed before. Those clothes."

"I tracked them here. Switched with one of the guys when he got taken out. He was a big guy."  
He smiles shyly and widely.

"You did a good job in there, Miss Sullivan. Your fourth mission, right?"

"How'd you know that?"

"Word gets around. You've helped more people as part of your unit than most of the men on the force.  
Without your little talk with Cerebro there we couldn't have gotten the hostages out."

"I'm sure you would have managed. Your impression of a dead man is excellent."  
"You were amazing.  
Would you mind if I asked what it's like, doing what you do?"

"I think this is my first time being interviewed. I used to be a reporter."

"Investigative, right?"

"Yep. Smallville. Home of the heroes."

"Chloe?-Chloe Sullivan?"

"How do you know me?"

"I was born in Smallville. I still read the newspaper. The Daily Planet ran an article…Oliver Queen, the Clark Kent, Bart Allen, the eligible heroes cite you as their friend."

Maybe one of those attempts to get the wandering lamb home. Maybe next it'll be Jimmy, saying how nicely I made ham sandwiches.  
I honestly hadn't heard of it.  
And I didn't want to, not yet. I was starting… almost, fresh.

"Your attractive superhero friend ratio is crazy, Miss Sullivan."

"Chloe."

My hands are covered with dust and sand, and I'm squinting in the dry air. A handshake, gentle but firm.

"My name is George, by the way. Do you need a ride to…wherever? Maybe we can talk heroic rescue missions. Or anything at all."

"When we move on out, why not?"

_Friendship._  
Being able to trust again.

It sounds good.

* * *

_**Endnotes: **_You probably already know this. The in-joke here is... It's George. The fiancee from Apocalypse. I always, always wanted to write him. I wish they'd kept him! And, yes, I'm as insane of a Chloe/Davis shipper as ever. The reason why Davis disappears on Chloe is its post Legion. He's trying to hold **it **back. (*ignores the plot bunnies of a George/Chloe/Davis triangle*.)

If you read, try and let me know what you think. Comments are Gold.

* * *


End file.
